About
On Harper
Harper Whitfield explores the intricate connections between human perception and the natural world, unveiling the quiet histories embedded within.
Harper Whitfield observes the subtle dialogue between nature, memory, and the enduring human effort to truly see the world.
Dr. Harper Whitfield is an essayist and historian of science whose work traces the long human relationship with the natural world — how we have looked, how we have named, and what the essay form can still do that no other genre attempts.
A Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the art of the essay, her writing on nature, history, and science appears regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and Orion. She teaches literary nonfiction at Middlebury College.
Her newest book gathers a decade of essays on the slow disciplines: birdwatching, botany, and the archival history of scientific observation.
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Complimentary
The Art of Noticing
Receive a curated selection of Harper Whitfield's early essays on observation and the natural world.